Least verbose way to constraint a view to its superview

Question

I have a UIView called containerView which contains all the UI elements in my view. The reason why I am making the containerView in the first place is because I would like to implement keyboard support for devices with smaller screen estate and I would not be able to embed self.view into the UISCrollView .

When I set the constraints on my containerView , I do it like this:

NSLayoutConstraint.activate([
    containerView.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.topAnchor),
    containerView.bottomAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.bottomAnchor),
    containerView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.trailingAnchor),
    containerView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.safeAreaLayoutGuide.leadingAnchor),

    /* constraints of containerView's subviews */
}

Since I am constraining all four anchors of my containerView to view , I am curious to know if there is a less verbose way (maybe a one-liner?) that will achieve this.

Answer 1

Using built in methods, I believe this would be the shortest way to do it.

let views = ["contentView": contentView]
NSLayoutConstraint.activate(NSLayoutConstraint.constraints(withVisualFormat: "|-[contentView]-|", views: views))
NSLayoutConstraint.activate(NSLayoutConstraint.constraints(withVisualFormat: "V:|-[contentView]-|", views: views))

But is this is something you do often, creating an extension you can call would be a better option.